Rabu, 27 Desember 2017

It was a very Echo holiday. It's The Daily Crunch.

THE DAILY CRUNCH

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 27 2017By Darrell Etherington

Alexa and Echo win the consumer tech holiday, HQ Trivia is hitting Android soon, and President Obama cautions against social media's impact. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for December 27, 2017.

Amazon's Echo Dot was the top-selling device at the ecommerce retailer this year. They don't provide actual numbers, so it's hard to gauge what exactly that means, but it's safe to say that Amazon sells a boatload of hardware over the holidays.

Also, the Alexa app topped the iOS charts for free apps, which is another strong signal suggesting massive sales. The app charts typically provide some indication of what's trending in terms of gifts for the year, since a lot of folks are installing new software depending on what they open.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is talking about the company's roadmap again, and going a bit further than before. He says the automaker will turn its attention to building an electric pickup truck after the forthcoming Model Y compact SUV.

Smart assistants are probably the next big thing in automotive design. Kia and Hyundai are the latest to focus on this trend, with plans to introduce their own Intelligent Personal Assistant, built with the help of SoundHound, starting in 2019 vehicles.

Edward Snowden helped build a new Android app, which will turn the phone into a surveillance device to help protect against physical hack attacks. People are skeptical about letting a current guest of the Russian government take over their phone's audio and visual monitoring hardware, however.

The Library of Congress has been archiving all public tweets since 2006, but it's not going to be doing that anymore thanks to the longer, 280 character limit. Instead, it's going to pick and choose what to preserve as of January 1.